User:Lukethelibrarian/Librarians and Wikipedia

To me, the reasons librarians should consider involvement in Wikipedia follow naturally from Ranganathan's five laws of library science (an article which I think deserves expansion):

Books are for use.

Ranganathan celebrated the tearing down of the walls of the closed scriptorium and the closed stacks as evidence of progress toward a modern library where the primary raison d'être is use, not just collection and preservation. Today, my concern is that we are re-raising the walls of the closed scriptorium, like the librarian-monks of old, to protect the impressionable eyes of our patrons from Unwashed Heresies like Wikipedia, Google Print, blogs and other new forms of information creation and distribution. These sources challenge traditional notions of the nature and value of authority which are long overdue for some serious reconsideration. I believe the better path forward is to seize every opportunity to educate readers (and that means everybody) in critical thinking and evaluation, to encourage them to actively engage and question all sources -- whether they come from treeware, subscription databases, big or small media, or Wikipedia.

Every reader his/her book.

Ranganathan's Second Law is all about the democratic and democratizing potential of libraries. As the public education movement strove for "Education for All," Ranganathan felt that "Books for All" was the ideal next stage of development -- ensuring the right of all to access information, regardless of race, creed, gender, disability, geography, language, or level of education. Now perhaps it's time to ask ourselves -- what comes next? Perhaps it's time to reconsider whether "Books for All" only describes a right to consume information -- or whether we believe that it extends a right to engage with information, to write in the margins, to participate in a conversation. Should that kind of mutual consideration and discourse really be just the exclusive province of a scholarly elite -- or should it be the right and expectation of every citizen? The democratic openness of that interaction -- regardless of differences in economic or political power, or media access -- may well determine the quality of that conversation as it goes forward, the quality of resources that future libraries will be able to offer.

Every book its reader.

Ranganathan's third law is all about discovery -- reminding librarians that we have a professional responsibility to help our patrons find more than just what they came looking for -- to discover ideal sources that the patron may have had no idea even existed, let alone were available at their library. Herein lies perhaps the greatest potential of Wikipedia for libraries -- as another means by which readers can discover new resources not just online, but also in their own resources. To realize this potential, we will need to realize more helpful ways for Wikipedia to link to books (the current Books page is a confusing mess) and also leverage the power of OpenURL to link readers to online archives of articles and research, whether it's in Open Access journals or in electronic databases the reader can access through their own library.

Save the time of the reader.

It's time for reference librarians in particular to start realizing and/or admitting -- as Mary Ellen Bates did in this excellent article -- that Wikipedia can be a tremendous efficiency tool in the right situations. Even those who do not consider Wikipedia articles appropriate deliverables for reference-service users are doing themselves and their patrons a disservice if they don't keep Wikipedia close at hand in their "toolbox." Wikipedia articles can help us get "up to speed" on an unfamiliar topic quickly, and many articles include strong lists of links to other sites of incontrovertible authority. The more we can contribute to that system by increasing the breadth of Wikipedia coverage and the quantity and quality of cross-references between Wikipedia articles and outside resources, the better we will be able to serve Wikipedia users and our own patrons.

The library is a growing organism.

How can we keep our libraries growing, organic and vital in our communities amid all the challenges we face today? I don't know the answer -- but I bet that if we get involved in information projects like Wikipedia that are clearly growing, organic and vital to their communities, we're going to find lots of ideas.